WASHINGTON--()--The Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC) released today the 2nd edition of its landmark report, The Case for Personalized Medicine, a comprehensive overview and analysis of the state of personalized medicine. The Case for Personalized Medicine is periodically updated and issued when the state of the science reaches critical development and adoption milestones.
“The Case for Personalized Medicine showcases how advances in science and technology can lead to meaningful improvements in patients’ lives as well as contribute to healthcare reform in the future by improving quality and decreasing overall costs.”
Referring to an approach that tailors medical treatments to individual patient characteristics, personalized medicine opens the door to a system of healthcare that enables disease prevention and early diagnosis and moves away from “one size fits all” medicine. The Case for Personalized Medicine serves as a guide to this landscape, examining the history and current state of personalized medicine, including scientific and public policy milestones as well as the opportunities and challenges that might affect the pace of adoption.
Personalized medicine has seen a steady growth of commercial success as new products arrive on the market. Since the first edition of The Case for Personalized Medicine in 2006, the number of prominent examples of personalized medicine treatments and diagnostics has increased from 13 products (69 percent of which were for cancer) to 37 products (56 percent of which are for cancer).
“Personalized medicine still requires much dialogue and action from the different stakeholders if it is to be fully realized,” said Raju Kucherlapati, Ph.D., Paul C. Cabot Professor of Genetics and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “The PMC is the key driver facilitating this dialogue and fostering the effort required to advance the understanding and adoption of personalized medicine for the benefit of patient care.”
Recent advances in personalized medicine applications have helped improve the way serious conditions—including cancer, cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases, and transplantation medicine—can be prevented, diagnosed, and treated. Through real-world examples of personalized medicine in action and insights from leading members of industry and government, this report outlines the potential of personalized medicine to deliver value to the U.S. healthcare system.
Geoffrey Ginsburg, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Center for Genomic Medicine at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, and a member of the PMC Board of Directors, noted: “Personalized medicine approaches are beginning to affect patients, researchers, and clinicians in very significant ways. At Duke, we are conducting a series of genome-guided clinical trials that rely on the genomic fingerprints of disease to predict the best course of treatment for each patient with lung, prostate, and breast cancer. As described in this landmark report from the Personalized Medicine Coalition, such individualization of treatment will become more commonplace in coming years, leading to improvements in clinical outcomes.”
According to Edward Abrahams, Executive Director of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, “The Case for Personalized Medicine showcases how advances in science and technology can lead to meaningful improvements in patients’ lives as well as contribute to healthcare reform in the future by improving quality and decreasing overall costs.”
Highlights from The Case for Personalized Medicine include:
- A guide to several clinical applications of personalized medicine and an at-a-glance table of 37 currently available molecular diagnostic tests and drug-diagnostic pairings that help target treatment.
- Real-world examples that demonstrate how personalized medicine is shifting the focus in healthcare from reaction to prevention, reducing trial-and-error prescribing, making drugs safer, improving health outcomes, and reducing costs to the healthcare system.
- A review of technological advances enabling personalized medicine, such as new tools to decode the human genome, Health Information Technology (HIT) to integrate research and clinical data, and large-scale studies finding new links between genetic variation and disease.
- An exploration of “personal genomics” and the impact of direct-to-consumer genetic testing.
- Listing of groundbreaking policy, legislation, and government initiatives in place and in development to support personalized medicine.
- Real-world examples of hospitals, regional healthcare systems, and educational institutions paving the way for clinical adoption of personalized medicine.
Supported in part by Ernst & Young Global Biotechnology Center, the 20-page PMC report is now available for no charge at www.personalizedmedicinecoalition.org.
About the Personalized Medicine Coalition
The Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC), representing a broad spectrum of academic, industrial, patient, provider, and payer communities, seeks to advance the understanding and adoption of personalized medicine concepts and products for the benefit of patients. For more information on the Personalized Medicine Coalition, please visit www.PersonalizedMedicineCoalition.org.
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